Status of mozilla packages for debian 3.1 release
Hi,
I would like to make people on this list aware of some of the problems
that I have with the *debian packaged* mozilla 1.5 version as I think,
mozilla is an essential piece of desktop application.
I've been using mozilla for years (since M16) now but mainly used
binaries supplied directly by mozilla organization because the debian
provided mozilla was too outdated at the beginning.
Now, mozilla packages appear only a week after the code is officially
released but unfortunately, the packaging, the bug handling are really
inadequate and more important several bug severely impacting the usage
have been introduced.
I) Bug Tracking System :
There are a *lot* of bugs open, that are several year old but that are
*still valid* (E.g. CTRL-ALT-C does not mark all messages as read in
mailnews). Has anybody tried to read a lot of newsgroup without this
working? You have to go through message->mark>all read (BTW the menu
still says the control sequence is CTRL-ALT-C). I submitted several bug
recently but got no response. Most of the bug are in this case : no
response at all. A few have been forwarded upstream but very little have
been actually fixed.
II) Font size
The default UI font size has been modified compared to original mozilla
based binary distribution. For High res screen (1400x1050 or 1600x1200)
the change is fine but for 1200x1024 or less, it is more questionable.
Besides, it has the very bad effect to make binary installed theme look
rather ugly. I do not mind changing the *default* font size but I really
think the default should be compatible with mozilla *official* binaries.
Changing this back to default is non obvious has you have to create
userChrome.css in you own chrome directory and should be handled by
installation process and reconfigurable...
III) newgroup Search
Each time you do a search, you need to reselect your search engine
(google, dmoz, ...). In the official version you only set it once...
IV) Regular search
Try to serach for '*' in some page : it does not work.
This shows that very basic feature are not working with debian provided
mozilla packages whereas they *do work* with the official mozilla binary
and are therefore either due to maintainer changes (the uncompressed
diff is about 3Mb in size which is not reasonable I think!!!) or to
compiler bugs that should be reported upstream anyway. Possible Compiler
bugs could be easilly eliminated by compiling the original code without
patches with the default gcc. I do understand that debian could be as
for X, the mozilla porting lab, but X do work as expected not mozilla.
--
__
/ ` Eric Valette
/-- __ o _. 6 rue Paul Le Flem
(___, / (_(_(__ 35740 Pace
Tel: +33 (0)2 99 85 26 76 Fax: +33 (0)2 99 85 26 76
E-mail: eric.valette@free.fr
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